Our staff is available to provide educational workshops at your
facility, association meeting, or conference. Here is a list of
topics about which we often present. Lecture length and content
can be tailored specifically to your organizations learning
needs. Please contact us for more information.

1) Physical Environment: This talk addresses ways to structure the
physical environment so that it matches with the organizations
therapeutic goals. Typical topics include maximizing safety and
security, providing privacy, promoting autonomy and control, enhancing
sense of self and continuity with familiar patterns and routines.
Both new construction and renovations can be addressed for the home,
nursing home, assisted living, continuing care retirement communities
and day care centers.

2) Total Environment: This talk deals with a much broader view
of the environment, including social and organizational factors
as well as physical environmental features. It usually also includes
a review of different types of philosophies (medical model, social/day
care, home-like, etc.) and may also get into therapeutic goals (depending
on the length of the talk).

3) Key Elements of Dementia Care: The National Alzheimers
Association has recently published a book the call Key elements
of dementia care, which takes a global perspective of dementia care.
This talk is a good overview for beginner audiences, but is not
as appropriate for people who have been doing dementia care for
a number of years.

4) Staff Training: This session uses experiential exercises to
help staff and people who train staff increase their empathy for
the residents experiences. Its a very active session
which involves the audience in many activities. Appropriate for
aging in general as well as dementia.

5) Ethics in Long Term Care: This addresses the extent to which
we, as concerned caregivers, often rob people with dementia
of their personhood in the name of providing good care. This talk
focuses on issues of quality of life, and different definitions
of quality, and provides a framework for facilities to use when
evaluating ethical dilemmas.

6) The Value and Use of Research: Reviews recent research on environmental
design for elderly and those with dementia, emphasizes the importance
of doing research, and how to get involved in it.

7) Models of Care: Recent research on culture change and models
of care provides the foundation for examining different ways of
conceptualizing the structure of long term careparticularly
dementia care settingsand how this impacts care practices
and environmental design.

8) How to develop a therapeutic recreation program for people with
dementia. This workshop discusses memory systems and spared abilities
of people at each stage of dementia. The discussion focuses on using
spared abilities to compensate for deficits. Participants are given
specific examples of activities that are appropriate for each stage
of dementia.

9) Swallowing Disorders. This one hour lecture provides an introduction
to the evaluation and treatment of eating and swallowing disorders
for nurses and nursing assistants.

10) Using the Environment to Improve Intake for Person with Dementia.
This lecture provides information about aspects of the dining environment
that can affect intake and mealtime behaviors.

11) Using Spaced Retrieval to improve communication, memory and
Activities of Daily Living. This lecture discusses a procedural
memory technique found to be an effective method of teaching memory
impaired individuals new information. The technique has been used
by rehab staff, family caregivers and nursing staff.

12) Using the Physical Environment to Support Function of Persons
with Dementia in Activity Programs. This session addresses the relationship
between physical surroundings and the performance of persons with
dementia. The effects of various deficits are discussed related
to both the type of activity selected, the skills required, and
the influence of physical environment. Simple ways to enhance resident
experience and performance are addressed.

13) Educating Staff about Dementia Care. This can be a single session
for planners, managers or trainers summarizing key elements of a
dementia education program with sample plans and experiential exercises.
An alternative format is a series of 6 to 8 1 hour educational sessions
provided directly to staff.

14) Using Place-based Models of Care to Empower Line Staff is an
interactive session demonstrating the practical application of Place-based
Models of Care to care settings. Exercises to open staff to self-examination
and critical assessment of care practices are demonstrated with
case examples of successful applications.